There is also a complete lack of understanding of T Trades.
T-trades are to cover transactions being reported to the tape as net trades. What that means is that a large holder had their broker selling ‘against’ a block position all day long...smaller trades that won’t tank the pps. Those trades are all done as “short sales” and then, at the end of the day, the broker covers from their client’s block position. The reason the “cover” hits the tape is because it is done at 98.5% of the pps of the sales during the day. The broker pockets the 1.5% difference as a fee. And since the pps of the second or “offsetting” leg is different than the initial or first legs of the the transactions they have to get reported to the tape as a “net trade”. Normally broker/dealers don’t need to report the second or offsetting leg of a transaction (actually before 1999 the OTC would report both legs of every transaction and thus the volume was always double the actual number of trades).
IG